Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Bush’s “Implied” Powers

(Reprinted from the issue of December 29, 2005)

Another inglorious week for President Bush. The New York Times disclosed that he’d authorized apparently illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens suspected of ties to terrorists.

He and his team admitted this was substantially true but defended the practice, while saying it was within his legal powers and his duty to defend Americans, and that he’d kept Congress informed of it. He called the leak to the Times “a shameful act,” and suggested that any leakers will be hunted out and punished.

He got a lot of argument on all this, especially but not exclusively from Democrats who denied having been fully informed, while four Senate Republicans joined the Democrats to block renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. He said it was “inexcusable” for the Senate to let the act expire. Members of both parties promised a full investigation of his surveillance.

But at his December 19 press conference, Bush refused to back down. He tried to be reassuring, but he left a lot of questions unanswered.

On such sensitive matters as surveillance, torture, and the Iraq war itself, Bush is losing even Republican support, and the Democrats, long intimidated, are emboldened.

He is being scolded by conservative and libertarian opinion leaders like George Will, who chides him for forgetting conservatives’ traditional qualms about untrammeled executive power, and Ivan Eland of the Independence Institute, who calls his actions “unconstitutional and illegal,” even “impeachable offenses.”

Bush’s understanding of the Constitution and of his seemingly limitless “implied” wartime powers isn’t widely shared outside neoconservative circles, where Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are deemed exemplary wartime leaders; he has apparently been getting legal advice from Harriet Miers again, in whom, as in Condoleezza Rice, he has found a gal who cain’t say no to executive claims.

Vice President Dick Cheney astounded nobody by joining the defense of Bush’s surveillance, noting that there have been no terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11, with the implied non sequitur. But what do we have to show for these breaches of law? Does such spying really achieve anything?

Once more, we are expected to have faith that it does, on the presumption that the president and his team “know more than we do” and know how to use what they know. Which is assuming a lot. It’s rather naive, like the “tough-minded” belief that torture is an effective (if perhaps regrettable) method of extorting truth.

The fact is that Bush looks incompetent, and this will be a hard impression to reverse. He has been convicted in the court of late-night comedy, from which there is no appeal. That’s where presidential reputations go to die, as Bush’s father and Bill Clinton can attest. You can’t refute a belly laugh. It means that people have made up their minds about you.

One danger of a second term, seldom observed, is that it’s when a president may become ridiculous and lose his dignity irrecoverably. Ronald Reagan avoided it by directing his humor at himself; Bush isn’t so good at this disarming tactic. His brittle self-justification only provokes his enemies to angry laughter. When you give people the stark choice of being with you or against you, you’re asking for trouble.

But how much respect should a president get, anyway? What we are now witnessing, I believe, is something that didn’t start with Bush: the age-old struggle over monarchism. Many men always hanker for a monarch, a hero, a single charismatic leader, even a ruler claiming divine attributes, like the Caesars.

The United States began as a self-consciously anti-monarchical republic, and the presidency was deliberately designed to contrast with the British monarchy. A king could not be lawfully overthrown, and legally he “could do no wrong,” but the American president was himself subject to the law, and to peaceful removal by election or, if necessary, impeachment.

Yet even here the monarchical impulse has often burst forth, especially in wartime, turning presidents into quasi monarchs; our republican tradition was put to its severest test (save one) by Franklin Roosevelt, who greatly enlarged executive power and broke with precedent by seeking four terms, the last two for the purpose of waging war. This in turn provoked the anti-monarchical reaction of the 22nd Amendment, forbidding third terms.

Ominously, Bush’s supporters like to cite the mendacious Roosevelt as an inspiring model of presidential conduct.
 
Bush’s Monarchic Predecessors

No American politician would dare to admit he entertained such monarchical ambitions or sympathies as Alexander Hamilton was accused of harboring. The charge of doing so has always stung; during the Civil War, Clement Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman, referred to the power-grabbing president, with bitter sarcasm, as “King Lincoln.”

The president retaliated by having him arrested and exiled to Canada, thereby proving the point.

Arbitrary arrest and summary punishment for critics were features of the Lincoln administration, and Lincoln’s crackdown on dissent — in the North! — remains the great untold story of that war. Some “new birth of freedom”! Lincoln not only called secession “treason” and “rebellion,” but treated even belief in the right of secession as sedition and subversion.

Though he ceaselessly quoted the Declaration of Independence, the “all Men are created equal” part anyway, he ignored the parts about “the Consent of the Governed” and “Free and Independent States” that formed the philosophical basis of the Constitution.

He never faced the clear implication of “Free and Independent”: that each of the sovereign states, North and South, retained the right to dissociate itself from the Union. Far from acknowledging this as either their natural or their constitutional right, he denied their sovereignty and claimed the authority to do whatever it took to keep them in the Union, even if this meant violating the Constitution he had taken a solemn oath before God to defend.

But Lincoln is now revered as the greatest American president, indeed as the greatest American, period. He has been deified as truly as any Roman emperor, and what is now called the “imperial presidency” is largely his creation.

An awesome figure, Lincoln, dwarfing even Napoleon in tragic stature and in the destruction he caused. It was his genius to make his enemies underestimate him, and I can’t help feeling that his most devout admirers don’t fully appreciate him either.


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Joseph Sobran